Ofelia García

Imagining Multilingual Schools Ofelia García

This book brings together visions and realities of multilingual schools throughout the world in order to examine the pedagogical, socioeducational, and sociopolitical issues that impact on their development and success. The chapters describe and analyze pedagogical, instructional, and policy efforts to develop multilingualism through school with different targeted populations -- immigrant students, indigenous peoples, traditional minorities, majorities, and multiethnic/multilingual groups. Each contribution, many written by well-known scholars in the field of bilingual and multilingual education, affirms the desirability of multilingualism as a societal resource and as a right of individuals, while acknowledging the social, economic and political differences that make the acquisition of multilingualism easy for some, and difficult for others. And yet, the book focuses on the school as a place of promise and resistance, having the potential to preserve, recover, and expand the world's linguistic diversity. The introduction, written by the co-editors, identifies the conceptual threads that are developed throughout the chapters. But the chapters themselves remind us of the importance of local conditions, despite the global pressures of the 21st century, in imagining and creating multilingual educational spaces.